Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Don’t get too close to the team. They are not your friends
and you need to maintain a professional distance from them at all time. The
issue is, if you get too close and they become your ‘mates’, well then you will
have problems getting them to do what you want. Especially if what you want involves
say, extra hours working, completing some task by a deadline or doing work they’d
rather not be doing.

Now I agree, very few people in work are really your
friends, I mean true, long term, trust with your life friends. Actually, in any
given company over the length of your career, I bet you establish that kind of
relationship 2, maybe 3 times tops. 99.9% are acquaintances, colleagues or just
strangers.

However… the advice is wrong.

You absolutely SHOULD get close to your team. You certainly
need to know ‘who’ they are, how they think, what they care about, their
motivations and dislikes in the workplace, you should create an environment of open
dialogue, trust and honesty. You CANNOT do this except by ‘getting close’ to
your team.

Let’s be clear, there is a way to get close that sees you
maintaining the meta-position, keeping your position and relationship clear and
strong. There is a way that is the opposite to this, where you submit to your
teams whims, undermine yourself and lose their professional respect because you
are a weak leader. People want strong leaders, they don’t want assholes or
wimps.

This is the central problem I have with ‘don’t get close to
the team’, it assumes you are an intellectual, social and professional moron.
It encourages you to slide to the wrong end of the interaction scale and become
an asshole, who thinks being tough with the team is the best approach. We all
leave bosses like that, we leave bosses that are distant and unconnected to us.
We stay with companies where opportunities are limited, pay less than we’d
like, etc. because the boss and the team are the best we’ve known. I stayed at
AOL about 2 to 3 years longer than perhaps I should have, because my boss was
awesome and so were the team. It took me 18 months to leave, because my boss
cared about me, professionally.

Get close to your team, but maintain your professional
stance. Make it clear you all have roles to fulfill, yours is to lead or manage
and you won’t allow yourself to fail at that (or allow anyone else to make you
fail). Make it clear you want to encourage, mentor, support, guide, advise,
collaborate and work WITH your team – but they need to be professional and fulfill their roles fully too, if they don’t then it will be a performance management
issue THEY brought on themselves. Show them you care about them being away from
their ill spouse, you note their reticence to take a day sick when they’re obviously ill, etc.
and when you need that urgent job doing, snap overtime, etc. they’ll be there.
(If they’re not, you hired the wrong person and should manage them out).

Treat people like professionals and you can act like one
too. Then you can safely connect with them on a personal level, in context of the workplace – not their
personal lives. You can have lunch and after work drinks and still knuckle down
when the need arises, you can make it clear the deadline is set and you expect
delivery, but once the project is over it’s time for Nandos!

See the difference? You will if you get close to your team,
professionally.